A Black Lives Matter misstep
How quickly we forget the darkness, the shunning and the death sentence!
Was it only three-and-a half decades ago that doctors and scientists were mystified by an immunity condition that was sweeping away gay men, Haitians and hemophiliacs, first by the hundreds and then by the thousands?
Globally, some 35 million people died of AIDS/HIV before the discovery of drugs rendered the disease manageable and affordable.
I am reminded of that awful time in the early ’80s when those suspected of having AIDS — the term didn’t even exist — were refused admission to all but one New York City hospital, left to die on gurneys in hallways; when nurses wore badges alerting against touching the infected; when homosexual men were kicked out of their homes by landlords and fired from their jobs, with no legal recourse.
When families disowned their children.
When small groups of activists and fledgling grassroots organizations had to go begging for research funds.
When president Ronald Reagan never spoke the word AIDS out loud.
When religious groups demonized the sick for bringing the wrath of God on their debauched sexual proclivities and cops routinely raided bathhouses.
Last summer, Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders formally apologized for the 1981 raids and one of the most massive arrests in city history.
The full scope of those dreadful years is recounted in How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS, by David France (a companion book to a documentary of the same name), which is a definitive history of the successful battle to halt the epidemic and push back against rampant homophobia.
The gay community has ample reason not to forgive individuals, political leaders and a vast array of unresponsive or outright hostile institutions, including the medical establishment and law enforcement.
Yet here we are, two generations later, and a Toronto cop is caught on video wrongly telling a bystander recording the takedown of a man allegedly resisting arrest that the individual being restrained “was going to spit in your face. You’re going to get AIDS.”
And so another apology, from Toronto Police Services, disseminated via Twitter: “You cannot get HIV/AIDS from spit.”
Good Lord, what are officers learning, if anything, during their training?
The threat over Waseem Khan shooting that video — that his cellphone would be seized as evidence, ’though there was nothing illegal about documenting the incident, and the content of the other officer’s remark — are now the substance of a complaint filed with the Office of the Independence Review Director.
If someone in the gay community wishes to do so, they could also use this incident to buttress a recent and controversial decision by Pride Toronto that would ban the TPS from putting a float in the annual parade, an event that has become a high point on the city’s celebratory calendar and brings millions of dollars into Toronto’s coffers from tourism and related festivities.
Also forbidden would be police stands along the route. LGBTQ people who are cops can march on their own but not as an identifiable group.
Presumably Saunders, who marched in last year’s parade, would not be permitted to do so wearing his uniform, which is weird given that flamboyant costumes (including faux cop getups) have been a signature of the lively spectacle.
When, in 2005, Bill Blair became the first police chief to march in the Pride Parade, at least symbolically bringing the force closer to the gay community, it was a watershed moment.
At its annual general meeting earlier this month, members of Pride Toronto, on a last-minute motion, voted to endorse a demand by Black Lives Matter to ban police participation, except in the line of duty for crowd control and the like.
Black Lives, of course, disrupted the 2016 parade, temporarily blocking its progress at Yonge and Carlton Sts. until their anti-police demands were met.
Then-executive director of Pride Mathieu Chantelois signed the manifesto, but said afterward he’d done so only to get the parade moving again.
Among the most laudable of the gay community’s qualities is that, while it has had every reason in the world to descend into the squabble of identity politics, it has historically chosen inclusion over exclusion. Although the parade began as protest (thus intrinsically political), theirs is an extraordinarily large tent, pegged by generosity and absolution.
Black Lives Matter has undertaken a crucial and valuable role by bringing racism and the killing of black people by police to the forefront, in a way that has engaged huge and disparate swaths of society, from North American sports leagues to municipal politicians to media.
The killing of black and brown citizens by quick-to-shoot cops and the broader racial targeting of minorities under (now curtailed) stopand-card policies are scourges.
But black lives mattering is not the exclusive preserve of Black Lives Matter.
Backlash has had zero traction with the group and that too is understandable; their tactics have proved widely successful.
Kudos to them for challenging authority so vociferously, for being relentless, for resurrecting in-yourface dynamics of protest.
But, in this instance, they’re as wrong and misguided as the cop asserting nonsense about contracting HIV from spit.
Putting my pain and rage first is marginalizing, counterproductive and vilifying, inviting recoil — extending it to Pride.
That is precisely the posture that fractures alliances and goodwill.
An endlessly scolded public will be driven into the arms of likewise radical deplorables at the other end of the tolerance spectrum.
We’ve seen that post-racial, as a concept, doesn’t really exist. When threatened or ridiculed or manipulated into believing that their hegemony is under siege, many will coalesce around false prophets of disinterred primacy, driving far right wing agendas.
As a straight white female, I can’t tell Pride what to do. But I can implore them to retreat from a backward march that stratifies grievances in a city with a good and generous and all-encompassing heart.
Gays led that humanizing evolution in the days of plague.
Don’t regress into a splintered past now! Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.